You’re out for a stroll on Mount Royal in the early evening when a family of raccoons appears out of the woods. They meander across the bridle path, stopping pedestrian and cyclist traffic for a few seconds. It’s a lovely flash of wilderness in the middle of the metropolis.

You’re tempted to say something to the couple walking toward you. But you don’t know what language they speak. Besides, you don’t know the word for raccoon (raton-laveur). Instead, you smile, they smile, and everyone continues on their silent way.

It’s a classic Montreal language moment.

“I read an article once about nodding relationships as a way of communicating without having to decide on the language,” says Sherry Simon, a French professor and translator at Concordia University

“The language situation prevents us from doing certain things, like making jokes. Either you make a guess or you can’t make the joke.”

The author of Cities in Translation and Translating Montreal, Simon has thought a lot about the wonders and woes of Montreal’s split linguistic personality.

“Generally speaking, you have a great deal of fluidity and a great deal of tolerance. And also the development of certain kinds of mixed codes, which we are getting more and more familiar with.”

Like the friend who told her that instead of saying “hello” or “âllo,” she now says “ello” when she answers the telephone.

A staunch supporter of Quebec’s French Language Charter – “Montreal must be a French-speaking city” – Simon argues changes in public signage and education led to a more harmonious relationship between Montreal’s main language groups.

Just as young anglophones are more capable and confident about their French than their parents and grandparents were, she believes young francophones have fewer hang-ups about speaking English.

“The ideological barriers weren’t at work with the younger kids,” Simon said. “For a certain generation, English was the bad guy, because English was the historic English of the English Montrealer. That historic English is being lost. The English we now see in Montreal is international English, the English of globalization. That’s not an enemy to young people. They have to deal with it.

“That historic English thing is shrinking, but it doesn’t mean the English language is shrinking its role in Montreal. And how could it be? The English language is so powerful all over the globe.”

Simon’s interest in the sociology of language was piqued back in the 1980s and early 1990s, a period when the bleak and antagonistic discourse from politicians and commentators was at odds with what she saw and heard on the streets of her Mile End neighbourhood.

“My perception of Montreal comes of the dark times when the city was so polarized,” a period that hit rock bottom for Simon with the “Richler Affair,” when Montreal-born writer Mordecai Richler was branded a racist and an outsider after he spoke out against the language laws and the Parti Québécois government.

“I was looking at a neighbourhood that was traditionally an immigrant neighbourhood where French Canadians had lived, where anglos were moving in. There were many mixed couples and I heard lots of languages on the street. I was witnessing something that was just not what was being spoken about on the political front,” Simon said.

“I was teaching translation in a French department in an English university and seeing students who had gone to English school or French CEGEP, whose parents were Italian and who spoke three or four languages. I ... became convinced that there was another reality.”

For her most recent book, Cities in Translation, Simon looked at four cities – Montreal, Trieste, Calcutta and Barcelona – shaped by the give and take of duelling languages.

“Having grown up in this city, having experienced its tensions, reaping the benefits of living in a double culture, is, for me, an immensely positive experience.”

She considers Barcelona, where Catalan and Spanish jockey for the limelight, the city in the world most like Montreal, revved by what Simon likes to call “productive dissonance.”

“They are both design cities, creative cities, exciting cities. ... You have the same kind of tension: which language to use, one being the more spoken language. And you have two literary worlds.”

One of the big differences, however, is the way writers in Barcelona move easily and often from one language to the other.

“They will write in Spanish newspapers and write Catalan novels. (Here) if somebody writes in English, they write in English. If they write in French, they write in French. There is very little crossover between the two.”

While Simon has seen big changes in interaction between anglophone and francophone communities in recent years, she’s not ready to say the “two solitudes,” the term coined by novelist Hugh MacLennan in 1948, are a thing of the past.

“First, it was immigrant neighbourhoods with French Montreal here and English Montreal there. Then, you had immigrant neighbourhoods, where you had mixtures of everything. These contact zones are getting bigger and bigger. But the whole city has not become mixed,” she said.

She likens some of the linguistic overtures that have occurred in recent years to the arrival of the métro.

“When the métro wasn’t there, it was hard to get from east to west. The métro burrows underneath and makes things much easier. You have francophones who live in N.D.G. We know all these things. It’s more mixed. But to say it’s over, I wouldn’t say that.”

She points this spring’s anti-tuition strikes as one example of the way young Montrealers – bilingual anglophones, trilingual allophones, confident, globally minded francophones – are able to transcend language and forge new alliances.

“Bilingualism is never symmetrical. The bad bilingualism of the past was when French-Canadians – I say French-Canadians because they were (called) French-Canadians then – were forced to speak English.

“There is more confidence in French. That’s why I am always surprised when these skirmishes break out again. I guess one gets lulled into thinking that things are getting better and that there is a general consensus that things are getting better.”

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